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If you own an older MacBook and have been wishing your notebook had the four finger gesture features of the new line you may be in luck. Macrumors has supposedly confirmed a hack that enabled four finger gestures on a 1st generation MacBook Air, that will likely work for most all older MacBooks.

All that is required for the hack is for users to install a disc from a new unibody MacBook and then change the registry a bit. It has only been confirmed to work on a January '08 MacBook Air, but avid hackers think it will work just fine with most other pre-October ’08 models.

Artstechnica describes how the hacker (michaelb) got this to work:

“Basically, he used his girlfriend's new MacBook's software to reinstall Mac OS X on his original Air, but with a hack on the Apple installer that checks against each machine. Once he got the installer to ignore the fact that he was using a different Mac, michaelb installed the OS but couldn't find the four-finger settings in the trackpad System Preferences. Some digging into the kernel extension AppleUSBMultitouch.kext revealed entries related to four-finger gestures, which he copied into all Info.plist entries (just to be safe). A permissions restoration and a reboot later, and the gestures were working.”

While this is method is very hack-ish it does highly suggest that Apple could get the four finger gestures feature working on at least early 2008 MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs with just a software update.

I have a unibody MacBook but do not even use the four finger gestures on a regular basis-I guess I am just not used to it…it is kind of a cool feature to have though.